Word: anghiari
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...tweed jacket. And he is being taken more seriously than ever now that Italy's Culture Ministry has committed the nation to a full-fledged pursuit of the so-called Lost Leonardo. Seracini, a forensic expert in Renaissance art and architecture, is trying to prove that The Battle of Anghiari--the mural once considered the greatest of all of Leonardo's masterpieces--lies buried in the Sala del Gran Consiglio in Florence's Palazzo Vecchio, behind a wall covered by a mural--a vision of the Battle of Marciano--that was painted in the 16th century...
...with a twinkle in his eye. "I know I haven't told you where it is yet," he says. He then indicates a 250-sq.-ft. area on the eastern stretch of the Vasari mural, behind which, he asserts, lies the masterpiece. Having looked at sketches and copies of Anghiari, I strain to tap into an inner X-ray to see through the mural to the Leonardo behind. The original, a Renaissance forebear of Pablo Picasso's Guernica, was described by Italian writer Anton Francesco Doni as a "miraculous" rendering of the ravages of war. The battle depicted...
...projects for sculpture were never completed--the huge clay model for one of them, meant to commemorate his patron Ludovico Sforza, duke of Milan, ended up a shapeless mound, shot to pieces by occupying French archers. His big mural commemorating a Florentine victory, the Battle of Anghiari, became a blistered wreck and was painted over. Little survives of his Last Supper in Milan. And so the melancholy catalog of ruin and loss goes...
Even when Leonardo turned his attention to painting, the picture was often brought to nothing by his passion for tinkering. The grand mural depicting the Battle of Anghiari was completely lost because an experimental lacquer, one of Leonardo's latest notions, dissolved. The Last Supper early began to fade, partly because Leonardo chose to use an experimental tempera. Of all his paintings, only two or three, including the Mona Lisa, survive relatively unimpaired...
| 1 |